Keeping Maine's Forests, Part II

It's been quite a while since I looked at the Keeping Maine's Forests initiative.  While it started life as almost a "secret society" due to the tensions between the negotiating parties, and finding information on it was like finding a needle among the many haystacks on the internet, it looks like it's now gone mainstream.  They even have a website.  The site doesn't have a lot of information yet, but they do have .pdf copies of their current proposals.

Among other things, the main proposal outlines two of the initiative's pilot projects. The Downeast Pilot Project appears to include purchasing a working forest conservation easement on several hundred thousand acres from a willing landowner.  (Or purchasing 12,000 acres on a larger parcel; it was a little ambiguous.)  Agreeing to a working forest easement means that the land will remain under timber production and/or recreational uses and will therefore also remain economically viable.  (Detractors from the initiative worry that large conservation easements will drive down land values; conspiracy theorists then surmise that lower land values are all part of a plan to create a National Park as landowners sell their land to the only willing buyer: the Federal government.)

The Western Mountains and Lakes Pilot Project would place over 50,000 acres under conservation easements, but the proposal doesn't say whether these would be working forest easements or not.

The proposal also outlines four "Demonstration Landscapes," which, in short, equate to what the initiative strives for in terms of outcome.  The Demonstration Landscapes are the Allagash and St. John Rivers, Moosehead to Katahdin, the Western Mountains and Lakes, and the Downeast region.

The proposal is an interesting read.  (You can access the .pdf directly here.)  I haven't yet read the "Keeping Maine's Forest-Based Economy" proposal, but I'll try to do that in the next day or two.  Now that the initiative has entered the public eye, there's quite a bit of information (and opinions on both sides) available through a simple Google search.